Hi.

It’s been five years since my first story was published in a little-known collection of short-shorts called, ‘Flash Fiction World’.

So to honour, move on, ritualise, something, I’ve decided to take the best (audience favourites, most downloaded, personal selections) short stories and put them into one halfway decent collection.

Introducing:

Take The Corvus: Short Stories & Essays by me

It will have stories previously published. It will have some new stuff. It is a best-of. It will be FREE to all of my patrons. I will be doing some signed print editions. I’m definitely going to want a copy of this on my shelf.

I haven’t worked out the blurb yet but here’s the track-listing:

Take The Corvus

Finders Keepers

Women’s Running Magazine

Doghouse

Tusk

Photoshop Wizard

Chew Toy

The Three-Oh

Hell’s Kitchen

Mr Lundin

Ocean Eyes

The People Who Live In My Beard

The Old Fools of Tudor Close

It’s Wednesday Night!

Monty’s Meats

Toast

@boyonawall

Old Knobbly

Blackberry Gap

Cardboard

The Last Days of my Dad

The Corvus Takes

ESSAY: Tales from my first Five Years in the Womb

ESSAY: On Writer’s Block & Other Buckets of Shit

ESSAY: What I Learned from Writing a Short Story a Day for a Year

ESSAY: How I made an Award-Winning Short Film in 7 Days with No Money, No Camera, & No Ideas.

The stories are all written but I’m going to go over and do another round of editing. So it should be primed and ready for the new year.

Star Wars - The Last Jedi

I went to see TLJ last week. I liked it. I didn’t love it. I laughed at all the jokes. I was in awe at all the beautiful bits. I got all tense at the battle bits. But something didn’t click for me.

Now, for me, I give it a B.

I’ll definitely rewatch it at some point and that may change, but what’s been more interesting to me, is how people’s reactions have almost turned into a parody of left-wing, right-wing politics.

People have been radicalised in their opinions. It seems, either you’re a far-left ‘Best SW film since Empire’ sorta person. Or you’re a far-right ‘Triggered nerd boy who doesn’t want change’ sorta person.

I’m sure there are many people who feel the same as me. Middlin’. But even I’ve felt a little forced over to one side based on people’s reactions.

When you read articles with headlines like ‘TLJ doesn’t care what fanboys think’ or meme’s like ‘Fanboys complained because Force Awakens was too similar, now they’ll complain because Last Jedi is too different,’ it forces you to try and justify your feelings, pushing you further and further into them. And then you come up with conclusions and you try to justify them, too. It turns into a feedback loop, pushing you further and further into your position, into your far-right, or far-left views.

Swap out all the Star Wars stuff and pop in something to do with Election Results or Brexit and I imagine the situation will be pretty similar.

...or maybe not. Who knows? Politics is weird.

If you really care for my thoughts on the film, I’ll put an image at the bottom of this post. It will contain SPOILERS.

Some essays for you!

When I’ve not been thinking about The Last Jedi, I’ve been reading a ton of interesting essays and articles. A lot of them I found on this wonderful website called The Electric Typewriter. Some I just happened upon.